Changing max pass through request body size in Nginx for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

Most of the NodeJS applications in Elastic Beanstalk uses a Nginx as reverse proxy which routes requests from port 80 to 8080. Reason being the out of the box NginX support for NodeJS applications in beanstalk.

Recently i was working in a nodejs application which uploads images and video files to AWS S3 and our deployment environment is Elastic Beanstalk.

With the default Nginx configuration i came across following error when i try to upload large files.

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/var/log/nginx/error.log
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2017/08/17 08:12:16 [error] 20884#0: 
*526 client intended to send too large body: 41324010 bytes,
client: 10.0.0.10, 
server: , request: "POST /filelink/upload HTTP/1.1", 
host: "fileuploader***.elasticbeanstalk.com"
-------------------------------------

As clearly mentioned in the log Nginx doesn't allow requests with large body to pass through it. Default max value is ~2MB. 

Elastic beanstalk allows this kind of configurations to be manipulated via, .ebextensions. What we need to do is to create a folder as .ebextensions in your root directory of the node project and add a SOME_NAME.config file to it with the following Nginx configuration. Here we are changing the property, client_max_body_size to 50M which increases the pass through file size.

files:
  /etc/nginx/conf.d/proxy.conf:
    content:  |
      client_max_body_size 50M;

Here is a sample nginx configuration from official documentation.


Let me know your thoughts.